Tag: Tea

On the dining room wall of my apartment is a cross-stitched picture of two ladies drinking tea. I don’t know where it came from; it was there when I moved in. It says the following:

May all loving friends

Be happy and free

In drinking a cup

Of harmless tea.

Every morning as I eat breakfast I stare at that picture and wonder “What does that even mean???”

We all know that tea is not harmless. Tea is a symbol of rebellion–our rebellion against the British. In fact, today is the 243rd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Our Founding Fathers considered tea so dangerous that they destroyed a shipment worth an estimated $700,000 (in today’s dollars). Actually, it was the tea tax and the tyranny it represented that was dangerous. The protest against the tea lit a spark and less than three years later, the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence.

So is this phrase a Tory code? Perhaps they had a secret club–the opposite of the Sons of Liberty–and this is what they had to say in order to gain admittance.